Saturday, November 7, 2009

Temporal Inversion

7.54am [pinhole camera image] JB

The oxymoronic melancholy of spring is insistent, pervasive. Amidst the effusive efflorescences, the shattering chartreuse - a lime-ish green that is alarming in its intensity - there is a darkness. That conundrum: the resistance of happiness in the presence of beauty because of the knowledge that it will pass, the ubi sunt effect. And here - way down here - out of step with the 'old world,' there is an amplification of the inevitability of the passage of all things. In spring the rituals and festivals of the old world's autumn are marked, such that at the height of the spasm of renewal, planting and growth, the celebrations, with some bizarre macabre twist, mark the ending of things - meditations upon death. All Hallows' Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day come not with the darkening evenings, with bonfire pyres, rotting and decay - but with bright sunshine and blossom. Senescence is always already a presence.

Thanks Amarilla - we're pretty mucked up down here ... (and hopefully you mean farenheit ... in celsius that would be fairly scary!) There is much more that can be said about cultural dissonance, including a childhood immersed in the literature of elsewhere, the motherland, full of badgers, moles and so on. None of which we have here. It has only been in recent decades that our own fauna has really made it into storytelling, our own versions of badgers and moles, niches which are occupied by species such as flightless birds (who took on the role of ground dwellers) etc. (No indigenous mammals ... except a bat).